The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. Increasingly, public and private communications networks are being built and expanded using various packet technologies, such as Internet Protocol (IP). Note, nothing described or referenced in this document is admitted as prior art to this application unless explicitly so stated.
These networks can be quite complex in terms of their physical topology as well as their logical connectivity and service offerings. Within these networks, a packet switching device may be identified as performing one or more architectural roles, such as, but not limited to, being a core, aggregation or access packet switching device. RFC 4026, entitled “Provider Provisioned VPN Terminology,” March 2005, (which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety) is available from the Internet Engineering Task Force (at ietf.org) and is a good introductory source for understanding various architectural roles that a packet switching device might perform in a network.
The architectural role(s) that a packet switching device performs typically depends on the design of the network and the device's location in the network. Understanding what architectural role a device plays is important for network management and/or other operations, maintenance, management, and provisioning systems. Prior systems require a human to manually specify the architectural role(s) that a packet switching device is performing, which can be a tedious and error-prone process.